Aix en Provence is a beautiful historic city with 145,000 inhabitants and is about 30 minutes drive from Marseilles, the closest airport. The day begins with a swim in the Lake of Peyrolles-en-Provence, about 20 km outside of town. The athletes finish the swim and take on the spectacular bike course that features lots of technical climbs and descents and features 1,400 m of climbing. T2 and the finish are in the center of Aix en Provence – the three-loop run course takes place within the city and parks.

The water temperature for today’s race was 21 degrees Celsius (just under 70 degrees Fahrenheit) and the air temperature was between 20 and 25 C (68 – 77 F), which meant for near-perfect race conditions.

French triathlon fans were treated to two hours of live television coverage of the race, which made it all-too-appropriate that the overall champions were from France. The men’s race saw a close battle for the top spot, with Poulat (3:49:53) getting to the line just over a minute ahead of runner up Sylvain Sudrie (3:50:57) – Poulat was amongst the lead group out of the water and made it to T2 seconds ahead of Sudrie and eventual third place finisher Julian Loy (3:51:04). Just over five minutes separated the top five with Francois Chabaud (3:53:09) and Olivier Marceau (3:56:04) finishing in fourth and fifth positions.

Jeanne Collonge (4.17.42) had a much bigger margin of victory – she finished just under seven-minutes ahead of swim leader Johanna Daumas (4:24:20). Third went to Erika Csomor (4:26:35), followed by Juliette Benedicto (4:29:09) and Tamsin Lewis (4:31:03). Collonge led into T2 and built up more of a gap during the run.

For all the results and to check out the updates from today’s race, click here.